| | |  | BY CHRISTOPHER CADELAGO AND RENUKA RAYASAM | WAIT TO DECLARE A WINNER — Kamala Harris will almost certainly deliver a memorable punch against Mike Pence tonight in Utah. It’s happened so many times before that her aides and close allies have lost count. When the lights are brightest, and Harris' back is against the wall, she comes through. Applicable sports cliches now come easy for them. She’s “a clutch player,” as a longtime associate put it. The trouble for Harris has never come during the largest moments of her political life. It’s after they’re over that she occasionally stumbles, when she fails to sustain the momentum she created after making a big shot. Harris nailed her presidential announcement last year in Oakland in front of 22,000 fans. Her campaign raised millions of dollars. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow told her “there is a good chance that you are going to win the nomination.” But then, setting a painful pattern, Harris backslid: Her town hall meetings were checkered. She flip-flopped on major issues and equivocated on others. She deviated from her own message, which itself shifted from hard-nosed former prosecutor to kitchen-table incrementalist, and then to something somewhere in between that became essentially indecipherable. Don’t worry, campaign hands assured nervous donors at the time, just wait for the debates. Others like Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders have been around for years. Americans don’t know Harris yet. And they were right. Last June in Miami, Harris was on fire. She landed one of the cleanest blows on Biden of the whole primary when she confronted him on his previous opposition to busing for school desegregation. Her polls shot up again. Still more money poured in. Then Harris regressed. Under pressure from Biden, she fumbled the follow-up. She slid in the polls behind lesser-known colleagues and an impressive small-town mayor. Going into the most high-profile moment of her career, tonight’s vice presidential debate in Utah, Biden aides aren’t trying to lower the bar for her as much as they are raising it for Pence, a smooth-talking Hoosier who once hosted a conservative-radio show back home in Indiana. After tonight, Harris will likely have one more moment worth watching, during Senate hearings for Donald Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Amy Coney Barrett. But tonight’s debate, and how it’s received, will become the stick for how she’s judged not just as Biden’s running mate, but also as a presumed presidential candidate in 2024. And this time, should she deliver an electric moment that powers thousands of tweets and eats up a morning of TV news highlights, Harris may not have to bother trying to sustain it, as a former Harris adviser noted to me. “This could be a mic drop moment for her,” the adviser said today. “It’s likely her last major appearance in the spotlight before Election Day, so she doesn’t have to worry about how her performance tonight could set expectations for a half-dozen more debates like in 2019. She just has to go out, nail Pence to a wall, and walk off leaving a trail of blood behind her.”
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Students participate in a mock debate as workers set up ahead of the Vice Presidential debate in Kingsbury Hall at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. | Getty Images | Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Biden beauty is a thing. Reach out rrayasam@politico.com or on Twitter at @renurayasam.
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| | DON'T MISS A THING AT THE MILKEN INSTITUTE GLOBAL CONFERENCE : POLITICO's Ryan Heath and Ben White are teaming up to bring you exclusive coverage of the 23rd annual Milken Institute Global Conference featuring 4,000+ participants and 500 speakers from more than 70 countries. Don't miss out on insights from the most influential minds and thought leaders reinventing health, technology, philanthropy, industry and media. Subscribe to our special edition "Global Translations" newsletter for everything you need to know directly from #MIGlobal. | | | | | | | THE MATCH IN THE WASATCH — Before Pence and Harris square off in Salt Lake City, POLITICO has plenty of pregame reading: — “Mike Pence has the toughest job in politics tonight: defending Donald Trump’s pandemic response,” national political correspondent David Siders writes in his guide to what to watch for during tonight’s event. — Head to POLITICO’s 2020 Debate homepage for the latest news and analysis, and follow some of our reporters and editors starting at 8:30 p.m. ET for a live chat during the event.
| | BATTING CLEANUP — In 2016, Pence’s spot on the Republican ticket reassured conservative voters that Trump was one of them. Tonight Pence reprises his role as Trump’s chief explainer. Nightly chatted over Slack with White House reporter Gabby Orr about Pence’s debate strategy and his role in the administration. This conversation has been edited. What can we expect from Pence tonight? In many ways, tonight’s debate will be a 90-minute snapshot of the entire Trump presidency: Pence will provide a brief reprieve from the chaos and a smooth account of what the president has accomplished, what another four years would have in store and why voters should be wary of the Democratic ticket. This debate is, in some ways, a potential launch pad for 2024 GOP primary candidate Mike Pence. He has to deliver a standout performance to compensate for Trump’s erratic approach last week, but he also has a chance to convince future Republican primary voters that Mike Pence is the only person capable of bridging the divide between the MAGA base once Trump is gone and the many disaffected GOP voters who have been repelled by this president. That’s Pence’s greatest asset to the White House, right? Absolutely. It sounds silly, but he is the president’s translator. He knows what to say to simultaneously please Trump and placate voters who might be drawn to the administration’s policy agenda but have a tough time stomaching the president’s conduct or rhetoric. After 9/11, there were frequent reports of Vice President Dick Cheney being swept away to a “secure, undisclosed location” to make people feel confident about the presidential line of succession. It doesn't sound like anything like that is happening during the pandemic. Quite the opposite! The Trump campaign says there’s no time to stay put when the election is four weeks away, and that seems to be Pence’s attitude as well. A lot of folks in the Trump-Pence orbit who support the GOP ticket were nervous about him leaving Washington for the campaign trail so soon after the president’s diagnosis. I spoke with several White House officials and Pence allies earlier this week who were frankly dismayed by his decision to proceed with tonight’s debate and campaign events in Indiana and Arizona later this week. Who should play Pence in the Vice sequel? I’ve been waiting for someone to ask me this question! Easy. Kyle Chandler.
| | ANTIBODY LANGUAGE — White House physician Sean Conley said on White House letterhead today that Trump has developed antibodies to the coronavirus. If you’re scratching your head about what this means for the president’s overall prognosis, you’re in good company. Deputy health care editor Lauren Morello emails us: The type of long-lasting antibodies found in Trump’s blood on Monday — known as IgG antibodies — usually develop one to three weeks after a person is infected. Their presence signals that the body’s immune system is trying to fend off the virus. But Trump’s situation is complicated. The president announced his diagnosis early Friday on Twitter. Hours later, according to the White House, he received a high dose of Regeneron’s monoclonal antibody cocktail — lab-made proteins designed to fight off the virus. It’s not clear whether Trump’s doctors used a test that could distinguish between the lab-made antibodies he took and any his body made naturally. The positive antibody test might just be an artifact of Trump’s treatment regimen. Or, if the president has developed his own antibodies, that could mean he’s been sick longer than the White House has disclosed, because it normally takes Covid-19 patients at least a week to develop those defenses. So far, Conley’s medical updates have raised more questions than they’ve answered. The White House physician has refused to disclose whether the virus has damaged Trump’s lungs, even though he was given a drug reserved for severe or critical patients who need help breathing. Today’s scraps of antibody information deepen the mystery.
| | PLEXIGLASS HOUSES — Early photos of the plexiglass barriers set up for Pence, Harris and moderator Susan Page for tonight’s debate sent public health expert Twitter into a tizzy. After seeing aerosol scientist Alex Huffman’s Twitter reaction this morning, Nightly’s Myah Ward gave him a call. “This is absolutely ridiculous. It’s theatre of some kind,” he told Nightly. “Totally worthless.” Actually, it’s worse than worthless, said Huffman, a professor at The University of Denver. Public health experts have worked hard to educate the public and leaders on how the virus spreads through the air, he said, and they’ve made progress. “One stupid instance of people disobeying basic guidelines, seen by tens of of millions of people, could undue months of educational efforts that we’ve all been working on,” Huffman said. Plexiglass barriers should be used in places like banks or grocery stores to protect workers and customers from “virus cannonballs” being sprayed on each other’s faces, he said. But in a debate venue, with the candidates already more than 12 feet apart, these barriers serve no purpose and the particles can still circulate with the airflow of the room. Huffman said it’s even possible that the barriers will disrupt the room’s ventilation, creating pockets of unfiltered and unclean air. The Cleveland Clinic is the “health security adviser” to the Commission on Presidential Debates. The clinic released a statement on Tuesday, clarifying its role as an adviser but not an enforcer of Covid safety protocols. That responsibility falls on the commission. THE MAINE EVENT — Is Susan Collins making her “last stand”? In the latest POLITICO Dispatch, congressional reporter (and Mainer) Burgess Everett breaks down why Collins is on track to lose her seat representing Maine — and how the race marks the end of an era for moderates under the increasingly polarized politics of the Trump administration.
| | | | Nightly asks you: What book, movie or TV show best captures your 2020 experience? Use our form and send us your answer, and we’ll feature select responses in our Friday edition.
| | ‘EVERYONE LOVES A WOMAN IN POWER UNLESS SHE’S SEEKING POWER’— Sexism in politics in nothing new, which got deputy magazine editor Elizabeth Ralph thinking: How do the obstacles that women face as politicians translate to the debate stage? In the latest episode of The Backstory, Elizabeth looks at historical instances of sexism at work in elections and how these dynamics might play out tonight in Utah.
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54,000 The number of students in the Boston Public School district. Mayor Marty Walsh said today that the district will pause its reopening of schools for in-person education. The decision was based on the city registering a coronavirus positivity rate — the percentage of Covid tests that are positive — of more than 4 percent. |
| | | PERSONAL FOUL — Nightly’s Tyler Weyant writes: I have a Covid confession: I tuned into Monday night’s New England Patriots-Kansas City Chiefs football game, even though I didn’t think it should be played. And I enjoyed it. In case you missed it: Patriots quarterback Cam Newton tested positive for Covid Saturday. In response, the NFL delayed the game barely 24 hours, until Monday. The Patriots flew to Kansas City using two planes: one for players and staff who came in close contact with Newton, and one for those who hadn’t. Foxboro, Mass., is not yet a hot spot on the order of the White House, but today Patriots cornerback Stephon Gilmore announced that he has tested positive, too. The team canceled its next two days of practice. Meanwhile, a photo of Gilmore hugging Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes raced across the internet. I don’t know how anyone could look at that series of events and say the NFL didn’t make some, to put it charitably, questionable decisions. And it’s not as if this was the NFL’s first encounter with Covid: The Tennessee Titans have hit 22 cases. The NFL canceled the Titans’ game last weekend, and their game this weekend is in jeopardy, too. Why did the NFL pretend like the Patriots and the Chiefs were immune from the virus, after watching it take down a playoff team of young and healthy men? Simply put, because of people like me. It’s hard to admit this. Football has become a load-bearing column in our culture, one of the last shared experiences in a fragmenting society. Now that column might be rotting from the inside, thanks to less-than-ideal Covid planning. To be honest, something similar was true before the pandemic. We already knew football was killing some of its players — from long-term brain damage caused by repeated concussions — and, for the most part, we chose not to care. So I guess I’ll assuage my conscience by saying it out loud. But come Sunday, where will I be? In front of the TV, cracking a beer and sweating a bit about the safety of the players in the country’s most popular sport.
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